Dwight E. Bentel, the father of journalism at San Jose State University, whose penchant for accuracy and freedom of the press was matched only by his passion for shaping young reporters, died Wednesday. He was 103.

The Spartan Daily, the student newspaper he founded in 1934 when he was just 25, fittingly was the first to break the news with a posting on its website.

He died at a Saratoga care home after suffering a stroke, his longtime caregiver said.

Bentel started what became the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, which over the decades has produced thousands of graduates in journalism — collectively, they have won six Pulitzer Prizes — and grown to become one of the largest programs of its kind in the nation. The school’s journalism building is named after him. And he was thought to be the oldest living former member of the San Jose Mercury News staff.

“That’s one heck of a legacy,” said his former student Leigh Weimers, a retired Mercury News columnist. “Just look in any newsroom in the Bay Area (and beyond). The professional standards he instilled live on.”

Like the world he covered, Bentel’s life was full of stories. There was his first day on the job at the old San Jose Mercury Herald in 1928, when his editor handed him a gun instead of a notebook.

Prohibition was in full force, and the paper was crusading to run bootleggers out of town. Several shady characters had threatened to kill the managing editor, Merle Gray.

“Merle handed me a big Spanish American War Colt revolver, a .45,” Bentel recalled with a chuckle for the Mercury News in 2001. “My desk faced the elevator. He said if you see somebody coming in who looks like trouble, you let ’em have it. Luckily, I never had to use it.”

But two other anecdotes defined his legacy.

Over the years, Bentel famously recounted the tale of the Spartan Daily sports editor who went to Hawaii with the San Jose State University football team in December 1941, only to remain mysteriously silent after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

“Oh, I thought you knew,” he reportedly said. “They canceled the football game.”

“Here we were, undoubtedly the only college paper in the world with a reporter on the scene of the outbreak of war,” Bentel recalled years later, and he had broken journalism’s unwritten rule — you’re always on the clock.

Then there was the time Bentel told an SJSU dean to “stick to deaning” when the administrator tried to block a story about the school football team breaking into a girls’ locker room.

Bentel considered journalism to be a noble calling, and hammered into his students’ brains that they needed to be accurate, truthful and responsible with their stories, and to always exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of the press.

“You were just determined to be as good as you could because you knew that was what Dwight expected of you,” said broadcast journalism Professor Emeritus Gordon Greb, 90, his friend for the past 60 years. “He was a model of good journalism.”

His personality, too, left plenty of marks over the past century, particularly his seemingly non-stop energy that prompted his colleagues to joke that instead of coffee, all they needed was a transfusion of Bentel’s blood, or that he must have had winged feet to fly around campus the way he did.

And don’t forget the white gloves he always wore because, in the irony of ironies, he was allergic to newsprint.

“This guy is the most unusual man I’ve ever known in my whole life,” Greb said.

The professor often lectured students on the notion that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed press freedom. It merely stated, he would say, that “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the press.”

Congress was making no law when the executive branch imposed bureaucratic secrecy, he would explain, or when the judicial branch issued contempt citations to reporters protecting confidential news sources. The only guarantees, he would add, were the public’s insistence that no one intrude on its right to know and the determination by the news media to fight for that right.

He taught reporters to get it right the first time: Set out to answer questions, and if you can’t, go back and interview people again before telling the story. In his classes on law, he taught students a valuable lesson: Truth was always the best weapon against lawsuits and critics.

“All these years later — I graduated in 1967 — I can still hear and see him in the lecture hall at the podium booming out, ‘Truth is an absolute defense!’ ” Steve Starr, the department’s first Pulitzer Prize winner (for a Vietnam-era demonstration photo at Cornell University), wrote in an email. “In a sense I think Bentel epitomizes a time and an era, the passing of which is a sad loss. He stood for truth and accuracy. Much of that nobility, respect for the profession and honor in reporting is passing with the man and his time.”

Dwight Essler Bentel came to education naturally. He was born April 15, 1909, in Walla Walla, Wash., to a school administrator, Joseph, and a teacher, Kate.

He started at the San Jose Mercury Herald in 1928 as a copy boy/reporter, then worked for the Associated Press and the San Francisco Call-Bulletin.

After attending classes at San Jose State College in 1928, he moved to Stanford University for a bachelor’s degree in 1932 and a master’s in 1934. That same year, the eager Bentel was hired by SJS President T.W. MacQuarrie. He launched the Spartan Daily and got approval to offer a degree program in journalism.

During World War II, Bentel turned over the department’s operation to his assistant, Professor Dolores Freitas Spurgeon, now 96, and spent three years in New York City. He did war work and studied at Columbia University for his doctorate, which he earned in 1950.

Altogether, he spent 40 years as an SJSU educator, including one as teacher of the year. He was a member of the committee that awarded the Pulitzer Prizes, wrote a column for Editor & Publisher magazine and authored two books.

Under Bentel’s guidance the department added advertising and public relations and grew to one of the six largest in the country. The department also was one of the first to require internships for graduation. Programs also expanded beyond reporting and editing for newspapers to photojournalism and radio and television broadcasting.

“(The department) was his child,” said former student Valerie Coleman Morris, an Emmy award- winning ex-CNN anchor. “Dwight, until his last breath, was all about the importance of words and communication. His legacy is that there’s power in that and there’s power in what we do — and with power comes responsibility.”

He was predeceased by his wife, Genieva Record Bentel, and his brother, Rear Admiral Carr Bentel, who also lived to be 103. He is survived by a son, David, of Monterey; a granddaughter, Christina Bentel-Martinic of Oakland; a great-granddaughter, Carolina and a great-grandson, Thomas.

Services are pending. Memorial donations may be made to the Dwight Bentel First Amendment Champions Fund, San Jose State University Tower Foundation, One Washington Square, San Jose, CA 95192-0257, or www.sjsu.edu/giving/.

WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton challenged Congress on Thursday to combat fake and misleading news on social media, using a post-election appearance to tackle an issue that gripped her presidential campaign and culminated with a shooting incident Sunday in Northwest Washington.